I will be presenting Harold Lloyd’s final silent comedy Speedy (1928) at 3:10 pm on Sunday, October 21, 2012, and at 7:30 pm on Monday, October 22, at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, New York, NY 10014, based on the discoveries in my new Lloyd book Silent Visions. Using animated slides I will lead viewers to dozens of landmarks and forgotten byways across town, in what is the first comprehensive study of New York’s most prominent role in a major silent film. The following PDF tour, accessed by clicking the link below, shows the Brooklyn locations appearing during the film. Of course the Coney Island sequences from the movie were also filmed in Brooklyn, but I cover that as an entirely separate chapter in my book.

You refer several times to elevated trolley structures. Those were el train structures. Although trolleys may have run on an elevated structure to get up to Brooklyn Bridge level, the rolling stock parked on the structures are clearly el train cars.

De nada. Long before Speedy was made, my father’s mother moved from Greenwich Village to Ridgewood, Queens. The train to Ridgewood ran over the Brooklyn Bridge and straight up Myrtle Avenue on the el structure to Wyckoff Avenue at the Brooklyn-Queens line and then down a ramp and ran at street level on what she called the Lutheran right-of-way. Later, the structure was completed to Fresh Pond Road. The cars on the line were like those on the structure in the shot at Coenties Slip, wood construction and open platforms. They ran from 1903 to 1958. On the structure, they drew power from an electrified 3rd rail as all the subways still have. When they ran on the surface, they had a contact on a trolley pole reaching to an overhead wire. Manhattan street cars used a center slotted rail with the contact going through the slot to the underground electric line instead of to the overhead wire since, after the blizzard of 1888, overhead wires were forbidden in Manhattan. Apparently, the safety of the residents of the other boroughs was not as important as the safety of Manhattan residents. Similarly, the els in Manhattan were taken down because the residents there objected to the noise. My aunt, now long gone, remembers horse cars in Manhattan up until WWI because, on marginal routes, installing the slotted rail was too expensive to justify. I apologize if this is all old stuff to you, but this is my first encounter with your work.

Anyway, am I missing something? I looked for the show of Manhattan sites comparable to the Brooklyn show. I have enjoyed what I’ve found so far very much. Good work.